Single Side Exercises: The Secret to Unleashing your Best Abs Ever!

There are many tools you can use to burn body fat. However some tools or methods will get you there faster than others. If we look, for example at Metabolic Conditioning (also known as Cardio) you may or may not know that Interval Training is a much more effective means of burning fat than long steady cardio training sessions. Many weight training methods can be compared the same way. A bicep curl is not going to have the same effect that a squat is going to have.

One tool I will teach my clients to use on a regular basis is the incorporation of single sided exercises. But not just any single sided exercise, the ones that are going to stress the hip musculature either by direct stress or by indirect stress in the form of stabilization (or bearing weight). The hip musculature is a tremendous source of muscle tissue that will become your best friend when burning body fat. Exercises like: Squats, Deadlift, Bench Press, Push Press, Good Mornings, Lunges, and many others, will yield more results than you can imagine.

If we take it a step further and look at variations of these exercises, we can start to develop a program that will get you ripped in no time. Single sided exercises such as Bulgarian Split Squats, Step ups, One Arm Dumbbell Row, Unilateral Overhead Squat, and many others enhance the fat burning experience simply by incorporating an increased Time under Tension. Time under Tension is the amount of time your body is working through a given exercise. The longer the time under tension, the more work you are causing your body to perform. With a fat loss program it is important to understand that you want to have the time under tension increased, but not to the point where you cannot reach gains in muscle tissue density (that is a topic for another day).

When you have a single sided exercise in your program, you in essence double the time under tension for that given exercise. All of which is going to help tremendously toward your ultimate goal.

Here are a few diagrams of some single sided exercises that you can put into your program today:

Ben is the owner of Groundbreaking Fitness, LLC in Vermont. Specializing in fat loss, Ben runs Fitness Boot Camps and Metabolism Makeover Programs in addition to Personal Training. For more fat loss tips go to www.bensbootcamps.com and sign up for his weekly fitness journal.